Week 2 in Precalc – Exponent Laws

This week in Precalculus 11, I learned about the exponent laws. I learned the following:

Anything with the exponent of 0 is equal to 1 because X has an invisible coefficient of 1 in front of the variable.

I also learned when multiplying numbers that have coefficients, we multiply the whole number if applicable then add the exponents together.

For an example: 2y^5 x 3y^4 we would first multiply 2 and 3 together then add the exponent (5,4) and we end up with 6y^9

When you have dont have brackets, the exponent is lazy and will only apply to the closest number. eg  -2^4, the exponent 4 only gets applied too the 2 and not the negative so the answer would be -16 but if we had brackets, we would have (-2)^4 and would end up with 16 because the exponent has to apply to everything in the brackets.

When you have negative exponent like 3^-1 you can put it in a fraction by simply putting a 1 over top and end up with 1/3^1 because the exponent becomes opposite (+/-)

When dividing numbers with coefficients, we take the difference of the exponents.

EG. 4y^5 ÷ 2y^9 so we take the coefficents and divide them (4÷2=2) and the difference between exponent 5,9 is 4 so that will be in our final answer of 2y^4

 

 

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